Science on the witness stand

[175560]

It's unusual for expert scientists to be called upon to give a full and complete explanation of an entire branch of human knowledge which is understandable by and intended for a non-expert. This is exactly what happened in the Dover intelligent design court case. Plaintiffs' strategy was to invite a series of scientists into the courtroom to

Comments

[ukelele]

I often think the survey course strategy is just wrong for low-level courses. Yes, if we abandon it we'll end up with people who have shockingly never been exposed to incredibly basic tenets...but I suspect we'd get more learning, and engender more passion, if we went with a good-parts approach. (In science and also in history...it doesn't work in cumulative subjects like math and foreign language, and English literature necessarily already does something like this.)

[steuard]

Mudd has recently (as in, since we graduated) changed its physics curriculum to start freshman year with quantum. I don't recall the exact structure of the three semester sequence, but I think their motivation is exactly what you're describing: catch students' interest with the cool stuff that they haven't seen before so that hopefully they'll then be inspired to understand all the ingredients that went into it.

One might also be able to achieve similar goals by starting with the basics but "drilling down" in a depth-first approach rather than the usual breadth-first organization: get to some cool, deep result by the absolute most efficient path you can find, and then later branch out from that "trunk" to fill in other important areas as necessary. There's a recent intro physics textbook (Matter & Interactions, by Chabay and Sherwood) that does something vaguely along these lines: the first semester's material includes many of the usual introductory topics (though in a novel way), but by the end of one semester they manage to build

[ukelele]

Yeah! I went on a physics department tour during my fifth year and they were describing the new curriculum and I was totally drooling. I think the odds I would have been a physics major (something I kinda regret not doing) would have been a lot higher under that curriculum (the hangup for me is that I'm really bad at the Newtonian stuff and didn't realize until senior year how different the rest of the major was...meanwhile I'd nearly aced E&M, voluntarily taken pchem, GQS, and stat thermo

[ukelele]

I don't like the quantum first idea. I, admittedly, have never tried it, but I don't buy most of the arguments supporting it.

I think that Newtonian Mechanics is 'cool stuff.' Blocks sliding down planes can be very interesting, if taught correctly. It is also much easier to connect to the students' everyday lives and experiences, and is more more susceptible to demonstrations and hands-on experimentation.

Many people seem to define sexy as some topic that didn't exist 103 years ago, and about which the general public has heard buzz-words but knows nothing substantive. I think they would list string theory, black holes, and superconductivity as sexy, but probably not statistical mechanics. It is old and most people probably haven't heard the buzz words. I agree that this definition would probably match with most students' choices of sexy topics, but I do not support it. Please fill me in if you have a different definition or understanding of what makes a topic sexy.

I prefer those topics about which the general public has a

[superflashgo]

I think we should incorporate more explosions into our lessons.

[steuard]

Especially in biology. That would be awesome. ;)

[coldtortuga]

Jen teaches Anatomy and Physiology classes. Often these involve dissections. I keep trying to convince her that she should prank the students:

1. Concoct a fake rat or cat.
2. Loudly ask the students to gather round for a demo on proper skinning technique.
3. Make a small incision on the nose or belly; apply the lips and inflate... inflate... inflate... inflate.
4. Pop with a pin BANG! out drops a properly skinned rat or cat

She has yet to take me up on this idea.

[ukelele]

*blam*!

So my dad recently retired from his professor-of-microbiology thing. Back when he was still a professor, there he was sitting quietly at his desk one day, doing professor stuff, when suddenly BLAM the building shakes and all the acoustic ceiling tile jumps and dumps a pile of dust on his desk.

Okaaaaaaay...

So it turns out that the guy down the hall had been having some problems with his tent. He studied anaerobes, so he had this tent to keep them in, with an airlock so you could do stuff but not kill them with oxygen, and a catalytic converter to burn off stray oxygen. He'd called in the facilities people (NB: if you work at WVU and do this, you have already gone down the wrong path). Guy pokes around at the tent, opens both doors of the airlock at once.

Oxygen goes rushing in, poor little converter tries its hardest to keep up and fails and BOOM!

So there you go! Explosions in biology.

[steuard]

I wish scientists would come out of their laboratories more often to tell the stories they've unearthed. Most people, I think, are uninterested in science because it hasn't been presented to them in an interesting and compelling way.
For the record, doing pretty much exactly that is what led to much of the "string theory backlash" that is still going strong in the popular science media. When you're really excited about your work but you aren't scrupulously careful to include disclaimers about "we aren't sure yet" (or maybe even if you are), people can get annoyed when it doesn't come to fruition as fast as you hoped it would.

Not that I disagree with you, of course! I gave that talk to the MIT alumni club in Chicago because I love sharing the ideas that I find cool. But I've been a bit miffed at the reactions that some folks have had to such things.

[ukelele]

I don't think including such disclaimers would really help, because scientists and the public have really different views about what certainty means and the issues around that. (I read a really interesting article on this somewhere, but I don't remember where...) Scientists think it's a virtue to hedge and qualify, to say exactly what you do and don't know and how sure you are. The general public thinks that just sounds wishy-washy (and isn't going to listen through all the qualifications anyway) -- they want to hear a "yes" or a "no" and they're going to shoehorn it into one of those boxes. Compounding the worldview differences, scientists and the general public use certain words pertaining to knowledge and certainty differently; the biggest one is "theory", which of course to a scientist means "as sure as it is possible to be given that our concept of knowledge means you could always discover a counterexample tomorrow", and which to a lot of the general public means what the hell is the big foofoo over evolution since it's "only

My two cents

[tladd]

Greetings to all from Stanford